NZ in nutshell

Mosquito bites: 19 (v.v.i.)
Flee bites: 2
Bites origin as yet unidentified (possibly NZ sand flies, kiwis or penguins): 6

I promised to share a few more pictures of my holiday with you. Below is a small selection. The beautiful New Zealand scenery is hard to capture in a picture, I find. For a better impression you might want to watch the Lord of the Ring series (again). All the movies were filmed using New Zealand as a fantastic backdrop. There are people traveling NZ just to visit all the sites where the movies were filmed and there are plenty of guidebooks available to help them do just that. Walk through the Shire, climb Mount Doom, that kind of stuff. We hiked through this forest for instance careful not to upset any giant walking trees or foraging Elves.

NZ had the coldest Christmas and New Years in 50 years, and eventhough I had packed every warm item I posses in this hemisphere it was no-where near warm enough. I had to go out and buy lots of warm stuff so that now I am probably the only person in Vanuatu with long-sleeved thermal underwear (including long-johns!), thermal socks, a fleece hat, and a fleece body-warmer in her cupboard. To capture the mood here's a picture entitled "New Zealand, summer 2006":

These kind of meteorological circumstances can have a strange effect on a person. They turn an otherwise rather style-conscious woman into a visual disaster area commiting the greatest fashion sin of all: SOCKS IN SANDALS! (Ofcourse I have now repented and am proudly clip-clopping along again bare-feet in my extremely stylish blue flip-flops)

Most of the time though I was quite fortunate with the weather, always happening to be where the rain was not. After the hiking tour I joined two lovely German gardeners - the man and the woman in the second picture wearing a red and yellow coat respectively - and on 28 December we drove from Christchurch to the West Coast of the South Island via Arthur's pass (detailed geographical info provided for the benefit of Joke T). We made our way south looking in on the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers to do another overnight tramp. This one involved walking up along the side of the Copland river, ending at a hut where natural warm pools awaited us to rest our tired limbs. There we sat in the warm muddy pools for a couple of hours looking through the steam at the snow-capped mountains as the sun slowly set. Good stuff.
Unfortunately after the trip down the next day my knees had had enough of all this strenuous exercise and more or less refused further duty. So the Germans and I went our seperate ways on New Year's day and I made my way up to Nelson (stayed in a place on Trafalgar Square...sic) near Abel Tasman national park and famous for its vast golden beaches:

As my knees were still not the happy campers (or rather 'trampers') they once were I found an alternative way of exploring the beautiful country-side, in this case a real Kiwi cattle farm. It was the first time I rode a horse and I thought it was very good fun. As did it (or did it?):

After this I took the ferry to the North Island and slowly made my way up to Roturoa via Wellington, passing Mount Doom on the way - as you do. Roturoa is situated in an area with lots of different geothermal fenomena such as geisers, bubbling mud pools, hot springs, coloured lakes and what not. It totally blew me away, never having seen anything like it before:
6)
Then it was to Auckland where I tried to indulge in as much things as possible that I won't have access to for a long time, such as seeing a movie (Helen Mirren in The Queen, a must-see) at an enormous iMax cinema complex, a drink called 'chai latte' at Starbucks that I had grown rather fond of and mountains of sushi. I also had to do some important last minute shopping as I had been commissioned by several ni-Vanuatu to purchase and bring back some items that are very expensive in Vanuatu (mobile phones, watches and such) a process otherwise known as smuggling - which didn't even occur to me at the time.

After a few meetings in Port Vila and catching up with some of my volunter friends I am now back in Lakatoro where it is three-cold-showers-a-day weather: 30+ Celsius during the day, and 25 C at night, with humidity around 80%. Lovely.